Case Study: North East Business and Innovation Centre

The North East Business and Innovation Centre (BIC) is an organisation which exists to service businesses of all sizes.

The 14-acre BIC site can accommodate over 160 companies in purpose-built offices and work spaces, and offers business support to all tenants.

And now the BIC has achieved ict active Leading Edge status.

The BIC site is a former shipyard site located on Wearside in Sunderland. Since its foundation in 1994, it has undergone massive redevelopment work to become a state of the art business centre for aspiring companies.

The centre is home to companies from a range of sectors, covering biotechnologies, software companies and regular office-based businesses.

Paul McEldon Chief Executive of the BIC explains more about the centre, and its ICT:

“When the units were first built and developed the Centre was heavily focussed on small manufacturing firms. However, over the past 16 years, the focus has shifted as we continued to build more phases and attract companies from a variety of different sectors, while converting the workshop units into office space.

“We now have 220 units, ranging from 100 sq feet to 6,000 sq feet, with nearly a quarter of a million square feet space on site. We have roughly 160 tenants, which is 85% occupancy.

“We have a steady flow of tenants coming in at the bottom, at the very start of their foundation, and a similar flow at the top of more established tenants moving on.”

The North East BIC is geared towards assisting tenants as much as possible to become established companies, and that includes providing a lot more than just office space, as Paul explains:

“We try to provide tenants with as many business support services as we can, and that includes ICT. We are, in fact, an internet service provider in our own right – we provide the internet and email services to all our tenants onsite. We also have a helpdesk ICT team who deal with our clients plus three back up internet lines to ensure our tenants have the best possible connection.

“We can also provide a full ICT contract for tenants where we can help provide equipment, install software and perform repairs. So we feel we have an excellent range of ICT services, facilities and infrastructure in place here.

“As well the ICT side, we also offer business support to tenants. We have in-house business advisors who specifically deal with the tenants and their business needs. This includes helping with marketing, product development and their business plan to be taken to market.

“We also work a lot of with schools and the community in the region to get people to think about business and we’re a partner in Sunderland Software City – a scheme aiming to help software companies in the area.

“There is a lot of infrastructure work going on here, and that includes a new facility opening in August for software companies called the Jupiter Centre. So there is a great deal of development in areas of the BIC which aim to help companies and tenants as much as possible.”

Paul believes that businesses’ ICT expectations have grown massively and it is therefore important to offer a high level of service.

Paul added, “Over the years we’ve seen ICT become so integral to business that it is impossible to ignore. Business’ minimum specification has been raised so significantly that we’ve had to invest in what we believe is good quality infrastructure and also good quality service.

“ict active backs up our claims that we do offer excellent services. It will ensure that tenants know they are coming into a centre with exceptional ICT in place. It gives us real credit for the work we have done here and will continue to do in the future.

“We are always keen to receive feedback from tenants so we always know where we need to improve and where we are really strong. We know we have a high level of services that will help companies grow and, when companies grow, our business model works better.

“We feel it’s important that our tenants concentrate on their business and let us worry about the ICT, and the services and assisting them to grow further.

“Until now, we haven’t had a formal accreditation of our facilities. We know that our infrastructure is good, and that it is integral to what we need to promote. The businesses we want to attract here, such as the software firms, need to have the confidence that where they are moving into can provide the best quality ICT and that they don’t need to worry about setting up or the logistics.

“Gaining the ict active accreditation at Leading Edge level proves that we have a superb standard of ICT. The ict active reports will also help us assess where we could improve or develop our services or facilities. We want tenants to recognise that as, we’re ict active, we’ve got the best possible ICT in place.”